Diary of a Haunting

by M. Verano

  We followed him up, but before I even reached the top of the stairs, I heard him emit a sharp cry. I exchanged a look with Mom before running up the remaining steps. “Professor Verano? Are you—”

  As he came into view, I saw his face scrunched into a pained expression, one hand rubbing vigorously at his head. “That sound,” he said. “How can you bear it?”

  “Oh,” I said. “You can hear it? It’s actually not so bad today. Some days it sounds like—”

  “For God’s sake, child, how long have you been living with this? A room in your house produces noises like a direct portal to hell, and you . . . what? Put your headphones on?” I didn’t have a good answer to this, and he didn’t seem to expect one. Instead he gritted his teeth and went into the room, eyeing the ceiling with academic interest.

  “Raphael,” he said. “In that toolbox of yours, do you happen to have a sledge hammer?”

  TUESDAY, JUNE 16, 12:30 P.M.

  Raph does not have a sledgehammer, as it turns out, but he figures his crowbar should do the trick.

  The others are all eyeing the ceiling nervously, but I look straight at him and nod when he asks if we are ready. Something is up there, I can just feel it. Something that will at last make everything make sense.

  He’s standing on a chair now. Swinging the crowbar back and forth to get some momentum. He’s made his first crack at the ceiling, but it just produced a lot of plaster dust. This is weirdly like playing piñata.

  TUESDAY, JUNE 16, 1:37 P.M.

  I passed out the minute the spiders started pouring down. That’s all I remember. I was staring straight up at the ceiling, we all were, and then black, hairy confetti was raining down. It took a second for me to register, but once I did, I don’t think I even had a chance to shriek. I was out for the count.

  The next thing I remember, I was coming to on the living room couch. I immediately started spasming, and I think Mom and Logan thought it was a seizure at first, but it was just me trying to get the spiders off. There weren’t any spiders by then, though, so I just wound up tearing my clothes to shreds.

  I don’t know how I’ll ever sleep again. Even without being conscious through most of it, just the knowledge that I spent those minutes in a flood of . . . In my hair, in my ears, under my clothes . . . Logan and the others had been quite diligent about removing them all before I woke up, but that just leaves the question . . . where are they now? Because I’m pretty sure they didn’t kill them all.

  TUESDAY, JUNE 16, 2:00 P.M.

  Verano says that wasn’t what we were looking for. We have to keep looking. I’m not sure I can, not sure I can take the risk of facing what we might find. Not after that last experience. And yet at this point, how can I not? And what could possibly be worse?

  I don’t know. In a weird way, I think that experience might have cured me. When I was a kid, I’d shriek and cry and run even at toy spiders. I was so scared. But how can any of that scare me now? Now that I’ve seen and experienced . . . It’s like I dug deep enough into the terror, I came out on the other side. I can’t be afraid of spiders anymore. I’m not sure I can be afraid of anything.

  TUESDAY, JUNE 16, 2:36 P.M.

  After some time to recuperate, we reconvened in Logan’s room. The buzzing was even more painful now. I’m not sure why I even still refer to it as “the buzzing,” except out of habit, or maybe for continuity’s sake. Verano was right: I think I had been repressing it, simply refusing to hear it properly for weeks, out of pure force of will. But his comment had brought it back to the surface, and now that it was there, it was just as he said: shrieking, howling, the mad chattering of a thousand lost souls.

  I think the others were finally noticing it too, though no one’s expression looked as pained as Verano’s. Except mine. Not that I could see myself, but looking at him and seeing the anguish written on his face felt like looking in a mirror.

  Mom took a look around the room—swept out now, but still with a handful of spiders creeping around in the corners—and said, “There’s nothing here, let’s go back downstairs,” but Verano ignored her. He was staring up at the giant hole in the ceiling.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” he said. This comment seemed like such an understatement, it hardly required a response. But Verano had something specific in mind. “Is there a third floor to this house?”

  “Only the basement, where Raph lives.” Mom started to move toward the bedroom door, but Verano didn’t. Instead he pulled his phone from the pocket of his coat, and started to enter something into it.

  “Phones don’t really work in the house,” I told him.

  He nodded. “So I’ve heard. But I’m not trying to call anyone.” After a moment he tucked his phone back into his pocket. “There’s something wrong with this room,” he said.

  “No shit,” muttered Logan. Mom made a disapproving noise but didn’t correct him.

  “Not just this room, though,” said Verano. “This whole floor. It’s too short.”

  “What?”

  “I knew there was something off about it as soon as we came up the stairs. This building is from the Victorian era. You don’t have to be an art historian to know that in a grand house like this, architects of the time preferred very high ceilings. This building would have been no exception. In its first incarnation it had a ballroom and a grand receiving room. Those certainly would have been quite high. But when we were in your living room . . . the ceilings there are barely eight feet. I wondered if, during some remodel, the extra space had been shifted to the second floor. But no—the ceilings here are quite low as well. So where did the extra space go?”

  We all looked up. Through the hole Raph had created, it was more than obvious that there was nothing between us and the roof other than a couple of layers of beams and insulation. Verano furrowed his brow, puzzled, but wheels were turning in my head.

  “The windows,” I said. Everyone turned. “Chloe mentioned it ages ago, but I never gave it much thought. There are windows . . . you can see them from the outside. And they don’t correspond with anything on the inside.” Verano stared at me, comprehension dawning.

  “It’s below us. Between the floors.”

  TUESDAY, JUNE 16, 3:18 P.M.

  We considered ripping up the floorboards, but Mom had the idea that it would be easier, safer, and cause less permanent damage if we approached from the side, via the stairwell. It made sense, after all, that if we were trying to find a hidden floor between the known levels, the staircase would be the best way in.

  Verano and Raph spent some time tapping at the walls and fiddling with tools, listening for hollow spaces and trying to avoid load-bearing beams. Eventually they found the spot they wanted, and Raph wielded the crowbar again. I prepared myself for another tidal wave of spiders, or God only knew what other monstrosity, but this time we were greeted only by a handful of lazily swooping flies and a cloud of plaster.

  When the dust cleared, Verano put his head through the hole. “It’s empty,” he said, and stepped aside so the rest of us could look. It was true. The space was much bigger than an ordinary crawl space—tall enough for an adult man to stand up straight inside. Light shone in from the windows Chloe had noticed, suggesting that this had once been a real part of the house. Rooms where people lived, not just insulation. But all we could see were beams and plaster and dust, plus a handful of tools left over from the last remodel, presumably. Except . . .

  “There’s a door,” I said. “Look, at the opposite end. That’s not just the exterior wall. There’s a door there.”

  The others peered in and confirmed what I had seen, and moments later we were smashing through the wall to create a hole big enough for us each to climb through. I was surprised to note that there weren’t any spiders in this part of the house—there didn’t seem to be much sign of any living thing, in fact. Once through, we picked our way carefully across the unfinished floor toward the door. It wouldn’t budge.

  “It’s locked,” said Raph. “I could p
robably bust through it with the crowbar, though.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” said Verano. “This door was locked from the outside. This lock wasn’t meant to keep people out—it was meant to keep someone in.”

  “To shut her up,” I said.

  Verano ran his flashlight over the door until his eye caught on a latch. Sure enough, it was a simple deadbolt. One twist of the knob, and the door swung open, releasing a blast of air so cold it made me catch my breath, followed by a swarm of fat, black flies whose wings beat slowly and solidly against my skin.

  I wasn’t the only one who screamed in alarm, but before long they had dissipated (or, more likely, gone to join their revolting brethren), and we were able to move into the room.

  It was completely dark inside except for a couple of hairlines of bright light coming from the far side. “That must be one of the missing windows,” said Verano, his breath visible even though it was a warm summer day outside. “Boarded up.” To keep anyone from seeing her, he didn’t say, but we were all thinking it.

  Raph had a couple of flashlights in his toolbox, so we shone those around a bit. The room was sparsely furnished: a chair and desk with a washbasin, and a metal cot in the corner. What was stranger were the weird squishy shapes on the wall. I pressed on them. It was like a big couch cushion or something had been nailed there.

  “It’s padded,” said Mom. “A padded cell.” The term conjured images in my head of people wrapped in straitjackets, throwing themselves at every surface uncontrollably.

  “You mean like for crazy people?”

  “Perhaps,” said Verano. “It would make sense. If she was—”

  “No,” said Logan. He hadn’t spoken in so long, I had sort of forgotten he was there. Suddenly I felt weird about him being there. He’s just a kid. Should he be seeing all this stuff, when we didn’t even know exactly what we might see? On the other hand, he had lived through the worst of what the house had to offer. Maybe he was entitled to see where it all came from.

  “Not crazy,” said Logan softly. “Epileptic.”

  “How do you . . . ,” I began, but one look at Logan’s face told me how he had guessed. Of course. The doctors couldn’t find the cause of Logan’s seizures, because they didn’t come from his brain.

  They came from Amelia. And if Amelia had seizures, like Logan . . . without modern medicine, they wouldn’t have been able to do much for her, except stick her in a padded room and hope she didn’t hurt herself too much.

  “But then why lock her in?” I said. “It doesn’t make sense. It’s medieval. So what if she had epilepsy? Why would they want to lock her away from the world for years?”

  “He would need to hide anything that seemed potentially negative,” said Verano. “He was the prophet of a religion that demanded that only good things happen to him. If anyone were to find out that he’d had any kind of bad luck, the entire religion would start to look like a sham. So he had to hide her away.”

  I couldn’t repress a shiver, though whether it was because of the frigid air that had been locked in this room for almost a century, or because of Verano’s comments, I couldn’t say. Before I could dwell on the question, Mom pointed out something the rest of us hadn’t noticed: an old trunk in the corner of the room. In a minute or two Raph had the lock broken and the top pried open. “Holy shit,” he said as he tipped open the top. The flashlight beams danced over the contents of the chest.

  They were letters.

  “Jackpot,” said Raph.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “We always suspected,” said Verano, “that there were other letters, outside the official record . . . letters Williamson either destroyed or hid away.”

  “And you think . . .”

  Verano let out a low whistle. “The missing letters.”

  For I don’t even know how long, we all crouched around Raph, hunched to share the light of two flashlights, trying to read as much as we could of the letters. It was a bit difficult, because many were handwritten, or typewritten with handwritten notes on the back or in the margins. It was hard and uncomfortable, but at that point we were all so fascinated that we didn’t even care.

  The funny thing is, the letters themselves weren’t all that interesting. They were mostly . . . whiny, might be the best word for it. Page after page of complaints: Someone’s car wouldn’t start. The barn burned down. The bank was foreclosing on the house. The hired hand is a drunk and hasn’t come to work for three days. My sister broke her ankle. Our daughter drowned. My cousin left town and won’t pay back the debt he owes me.

  Some told of tragedies, some recounted little more than the frustrations of a bad day. But all were pretty . . . ordinary. Just the ordinary bad news of life.

  “What . . . what are these?” said Mom. “Why did people send this stuff to him? And how did it end up here?”

  “It’s Pronoica,” said Raph in a low voice. “It’s what we were looking for all along.”

  The question I had asked Raph in the library came back to me: If all the letters Williamson received were so positive, why did the house seem so dark and troubled? Now I understood—those weren’t all the letters he received—those were just the ones he wanted people to know about.

  “Williamson was a man with much to hide,” said Verano. “It must have been daunting for him, trying to maintain this religion based around the premise that you can direct the universe to only hand you good things. I suspect that his technique worked for a while . . . but it was like a pendulum. There is only so far you can push it to one side, before it swings back in the other direction.”

  In the dim light cast by the flashlights, I saw Mom’s eyes widen in horror. I knew what she was thinking. She was so like Williamson—always believing the best of everyone, and that the universe itself had nothing but good intentions toward her. She believed as fervently as Williamson had that if she focused her energy on good things, good things would come to her. The idea that doing this was only delaying the time when an evil undertow would drag her back down with even greater intensity . . . the horror of the idea was inescapable.

  “I have suspected for some time that Williamson was hiding something like this. Evidence that Pronoica was not the cure for all ills. The complaints in these letters may seem small, but the stakes were incredibly high for Williamson. His entire empire would have come crumbling down around him if people found out about this. So he hid them away. Desperation to find a secure place to store these letters must have been what led him to discover this space between the floors.”

  “And when Amelia became another liability,” I said. “Another piece of bad news, he shut her up in here too.”

  “Guys,” said Logan. “Look at this.”

  I thought he had picked up one of the letters and started to read it, but as I looked more closely, I saw that it wasn’t a letter. It was an old school notebook, like kids might have used in the 1940s. It was filled with writing in a large, looping script. Raph grabbed it out of Logan’s hands.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “Her journal,” said Logan.

  “Christ,” said Raph. “It’s got everything. The whole story. The clinic . . .” His eyes scanned the pages rapidly. Then he looked up. “Something did happen here. Something happened to Amelia.”

  Stopping and starting as he flipped through the pages for information, Raph gradually told us the story. The first few pages were ordinary enough: Amelia’s concerns about school and hopes for her future. Only occasional mentions of her father’s project, which didn’t seem to interest her much. At least until he opened the clinic.

  She was excited about that. Apparently a sweet-tempered, tenderhearted girl, she believed absolutely in her father’s power as a healer, and looked forward to seeing the sick and crippled healed by his hand. He assembled a small crowd, brought them to remote Idaho, and invited her to attend his ritual. But as he stood before them, chanting and muttering and invoking the God power, something happened to Ame
lia. The way she put it, she was possessed by some spirit that took control of her body and mind and threw her to the ground, where she shook violently and made terrible noises.

  She lost consciousness, and when she woke up, she was in this room—locked away, friendless, hopeless, all but forgotten, to live out the rest of her short life in forced seclusion. The only human interaction she had from then on was when a silent servant brought her meals, and when her father mounted the stairs from time to time to stow more letters away in the chest of her room, which he did without speaking to or even looking at her.

  At first, the bad letters arrived only occasionally, but soon after the failure of the Pronoica Clinic, they began to increase in number and frequency. Family members of those who had attended the clinic wrote to Williamson to ask him what had happened. Ask him to explain to them why their loved ones had returned to them silent and stricken. What did he do to them? Not only were they not cured, they were worse than ever.

  What had Williamson done to ensure their silence? Threats? Blackmail? Hypnosis? Or did he wield the dangerous energy of Pronoica against them now, to suit his own ends?

  But those were only the first letters. They dried up after a while, but were replaced by something far more sinister. Dozens and dozens of letters, many of them duplicates, some of them garbled, and others . . . Williamson hid those letters even more carefully, and Amelia could only guess at what they contained.

  Raph eventually put the notebook down on top of the other letters, and even in nothing more than the glow from a flashlight, I could see how pale he was.

  Behind me I could feel Mom trembling. “I think I’m going to be sick,” she said. I thought she was being metaphorical, but a moment later she started to sway, and then she fell backward, catching herself with a hand grasping at one of the pads on the wall. It came free from the wall as she fell, and there was the sound of a loud rip. I rushed to her side to make sure she was okay, while Raph shone his flashlight on us.